1.5 Pound ’Miracle’ Preemie’ is born on a cruise ship

mangaloretoday.com

USA, September 25, 2015: Under normal circumstances, the odds of survival for a baby born at 23 weeks are slim: Around 30 percent, according to some doctors. Just 15 percent, say others.

But under the circumstances in which Haiden Morgan was born - on a cruise ship more than 100 miles from land, with no obstetrician, no incubator and 14 hours to reach the nearest hospital? He had practically no chance.

"The doctors really tell us that he’s a miracle baby," Haiden’s mother, Emily Morgan of Ogden, Utah, told The Washington Post. "It’s a miracle he’s here."

 

She hadn’t expected to need a miracle when she, her husband and their 3-year-old daughter boarded a Royal Caribbean cruise in August. She was only five months pregnant at the time, and her doctor had approved the trip.

But on her second night at sea, amid the almost imperceptible motion of the waves and the hum of ship machinery, the contractions started.

At first, she and her husband, Chase Morgan, weren’t too alarmed. She had been pregnant before and had a sense of what to expect.

Perhaps they were false labor pains, known as Braxton Hicks contractions. He pulled out a computer and began to search online for an explanation.

An hour passed, and the pain didn’t go away. Two hours. Three.

In the fourth hour, the blood appeared.

They called down to the medical unit, and Emily Morgan was brought over in a wheelchair. Looking back, she’s amazed that she wasn’t more panicked.

"I knew something was wrong, but I didn’t really comprehend how wrong. I didn’t think about what the possibilities were. All I knew was I was going to have a baby," she said.

Now, she knows, "I was naive. I didn’t understand what was going to happen from there. . . . I didn’t realize that there were going to be complications, and there were going to be problems, and we were a long way out at sea. All of that unfolded as we went along."

In the medical center, a nurse assessed Emily Morgan, her expression nervous. She called down a ship-board doctor, who confirmed what she already knew: she had inexplicably gone into labor. But the doctor warned her that the ship’s medical unit was ill-equipped to deliver such a severely premature infant. And Puerto Rico, the nearest land, was a long way off yet.

" ’Don’t push, don’t do anything,’ they told me," she recalled. "And I said, ’I can tell these are contractions. I’m going to have this baby. I have to push.’ "

Steely-voiced at the memory, she repeated, "I had to push."

Less than an hour later, at 1:56 a.m. on Aug. 31, her son was born.